Sen. Al White: So now who’s the RINO?

If GOP gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes[2] doesn’t pull 10 percent of the vote in this year’s elections, Republicans will become a minor party.

What does that mean for Republicans, besides a little embarrassment?

The names of Republican candidates won’t be on top of the 2012 ballot alongside the Democrats’ names, said Secretary of State Bernie Buescher[3]. They will be positioned along with other third-party candidates, the Libertarians and Green Party members and such.

“I think it is fairly minor — not to make a pun out of it,” Buescher said.

Maes won the GOP primary in August, but since then a number of prominent Republicans have defected, endorsing Tom Tancredo[4], a former Republican congressman running on the American Constitution Party ticket.

“Republicans have been busting my chops for years, calling me a RINO — a Republican In Name Only — because I haven’t always endorsed the Republican candidate or cause,” he said.

“Now here they are lining up to endorse Tom Tancredo, a minor-party candidate.”

White said he believes it would be a “huge symbolic embarrassment” for Colorado Republicans to be labeled a minor party.

Republicans currently are the largest voting bloc in Colorado, with 852,790 voters, followed by 794,678 Democratic voters and 741,972 unaffiliated voters.

Dick Wadhams[6], chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, has unsuccessfully tried to get Maes to drop out, saying he can’t beat Democrat John Hickenlooper.

But Wadhams said he and plenty of Republicans plan to vote for Maes.

“I think it’s a terribly remote possibility that we would become a minor party,” he said.

But if it did happen … ?

Not much would change, Wadhams said, because the party would still operate by the bylaws it already has in place.

State statute defines major political party as any political party that “at the last preceding gubernatorial election was represented on the official ballot either by political party candidates or by individual nominees and whose candidate at the last preceding gubernatorial election received at least 10 percent of the total gubernatorial votes cast.”